MLOCK(1)

📦
version 2007f · 4 versions
, in ubuntu jammy

💅 MLOCK — the manual page, but make it make sense

okay bestie, welcome to the mlock(1) page — that's section 1 of the Unix manual, for the girlies keeping track 🎀

✨ NAME ✨

mlock — lock a mailbox 🔒

like, that's it. that's the whole job. it locks a mailbox. queen behavior honestly.

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

/usr/bin/mlock

no flags. no arguments. no options. no little extras. she takes nothing and she gives everything. 💅

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so here's the tea ☕ — if libc-client.so can't create a mailbox lock file all by itself, it goes and calls this program. that's the whole reason mlock exists. it's the backup dancer, the understudy, the girl who gets called in when the main character can't hit the note.

and why does that matter? because it makes using the mailbox safe over i.e. NFS. yes, that NFS. the one that ruins everything. mlock is out here saving your mail from getting absolutely cooked by network filesystem chaos. 🫶

big warning energy: there is no reason to call mlock yourself or through another program. fr fr. do not. she is not for you. she is for libc-client.so and libc-client.so only. 😭

also, she's setgid mail — which is iconic, because it means there's no need to change the permissions of /var/mail to 1777. that's right, you can leave /var/mail alone. put the chmod down. step away from the chmod. 🙈

💀 BUGS 💀

this is the part where we keep it real:

No documentation other than this crappy man page,

yes, that's a direct quote, and yes, it's shading itself in its own man page. not me reading the documentation for the documentation and finding out the documentation is self-aware 💀 iconic honestly. she said "this is all you get." periodt.

👑 AUTHOR 👑

mlock was written by Mark Crispin <mrc@cac.washington.edu> — a real one, a legend, main character energy ⭐

this man page was written for Debian GNU/Linux by Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar@debian.org> — shoutout to the girlie who documented the undocumented 🎀

🌈 and that's the vibe check 🌈

this page is from UW IMAP, version 2007f~dfsg-7build1, dated 2021-12-01. thanks for coming to my TED talk, go lock a mailbox (don't actually, it's not for you), mwah 💖✨🧚

📦 where this page comes from